Re: Self Inflicted "Immersion" Program

From: David Chien (chiendh_at_uci.edu)
Date: 09/13/04 

Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 15:55:56 -0700

> Pakistani car dealers and Iranian (you'll never guess) carpet salesmen
> in Osaka who spoke Japanese with amazing fluency but had never cracked
> book one in order to study it. Kanji? Are you kidding? They couldn't
> even read hiragana. They picked up what they knew through interaction
> through business with Japanese people. I don't speak Urdu or Farsi, so I
> don't know if they had help from their native languages, but their
> command of keigo was perfect, too.

   On the ranking of foreign languages in order of difficulty to learn
for English natives, middle eastern and Japanese/Chinese were ranked
among the most difficult of them all to learn.

   Maybe that's why they think Japanese is easy to learn?

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